With US News Being Challenged by Top Schools, Does it Make More Sense to Combine Rankings?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:This page is exactly what’s wrong with rankings. Quibbling over Duke, Georgetown, Columbia is nonsense. There is no way anyone can credibly say any of these are “better” than the others. They are just different, with different areas of strength and different weakness. Many of the supposed strengths and weaknesses are just value judgments. There is no actual science behind college rankings and we should all just ignore them.

And, to the poster who keeps chiming in that it helped them cull down the 3000+ colleges, you could absolutely do that without any ordinal ranking.

Why is the blame on the consumers seeking information instead of the subterfuge by the schools by trying to block public information about admissions processes and graduate outcomes?

These schools basically are telling us, “Forget about rankings and pick a school that makes you *feel* good.” I’m sorry, but when people are spending hundreds of thousands of dollars for each child, that’s crap.

Frankly, the most honest information is probably coming from the Department of Education College Scorecard. It’s incomplete information since it’s only based on those who took out federal student loans, but it’s at least better than the fuzzy platitudes of the schools. It’s funny that, as far as I’ve seen, the schools that have so much zeal in criticizing the US News rankings rarely point to any other alternative like the College Scorecard (lest they find about the amount of student loans people are taking out for how a whole lot of schools and/or majors that have pretty terrible income prospects).

If the primary interest is ROI and financial outcomes, then Wall Street Journal and Forbes are the best rankings. Wall Street Journal actually has a subranking that ranks undergrad schools by outcomes:

1. Princeton
1. Yale
3. Duke
3. Harvard
3. MIT
3. Stanford
7. Cornell
8. Caltech
8. UChicago
8. Dartmouth
11. JHU
12. Northwestern
13. UPenn
14. Brown
15. Vanderbilt
16. UMich
17. WashU
18. UCLA
19. Amherst
19. Berkeley
21. Williams
22. UNC
23. Columbia
24. USC
25. Emory

Why is Columbia that low? Are they including GS?

That would be my guess

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:This page is exactly what’s wrong with rankings. Quibbling over Duke, Georgetown, Columbia is nonsense. There is no way anyone can credibly say any of these are “better” than the others. They are just different, with different areas of strength and different weakness. Many of the supposed strengths and weaknesses are just value judgments. There is no actual science behind college rankings and we should all just ignore them.

And, to the poster who keeps chiming in that it helped them cull down the 3000+ colleges, you could absolutely do that without any ordinal ranking.

Why is the blame on the consumers seeking information instead of the subterfuge by the schools by trying to block public information about admissions processes and graduate outcomes?

These schools basically are telling us, “Forget about rankings and pick a school that makes you *feel* good.” I’m sorry, but when people are spending hundreds of thousands of dollars for each child, that’s crap.

Frankly, the most honest information is probably coming from the Department of Education College Scorecard. It’s incomplete information since it’s only based on those who took out federal student loans, but it’s at least better than the fuzzy platitudes of the schools. It’s funny that, as far as I’ve seen, the schools that have so much zeal in criticizing the US News rankings rarely point to any other alternative like the College Scorecard (lest they find about the amount of student loans people are taking out for how a whole lot of schools and/or majors that have pretty terrible income prospects).

If the primary interest is ROI and financial outcomes, then Wall Street Journal and Forbes are the best rankings. Wall Street Journal actually has a subranking that ranks undergrad schools by outcomes:

1. Princeton
1. Yale
3. Duke
3. Harvard
3. MIT
3. Stanford
7. Cornell
8. Caltech
8. UChicago
8. Dartmouth
11. JHU
12. Northwestern
13. UPenn
14. Brown
15. Vanderbilt
16. UMich
17. WashU
18. UCLA
19. Amherst
19. Berkeley
21. Williams
22. UNC
23. Columbia
24. USC
25. Emory

Georgetown and Notre Dame are better than sevral schools here for ROI

Not really apparently. Especially when you take diversity into account. Wealthy students staying wealthy after graduation isn't impressive.

Very fair point, Georgetown takes a ridiculous amount of prep school kids. The only schools I've seen rival Georgetown in that regard are UChicago and Cornell.

UChicago sure likes the Big 3 kids who got dinged by the Ivies ED1.

+1 have seen this a lot too

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Since US News is potentially being undermined by unhappy universities that dislike US News' system, is shifting to a more balanced approach a better representation of where colleges stand? For example, using something like this which was previously shared to avoid over-reliance on one source:

Pretty funny how UVA ended up exactly the same spot overall as with USN

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:This page is exactly what’s wrong with rankings. Quibbling over Duke, Georgetown, Columbia is nonsense. There is no way anyone can credibly say any of these are “better” than the others. They are just different, with different areas of strength and different weakness. Many of the supposed strengths and weaknesses are just value judgments. There is no actual science behind college rankings and we should all just ignore them.

And, to the poster who keeps chiming in that it helped them cull down the 3000+ colleges, you could absolutely do that without any ordinal ranking.

Why is the blame on the consumers seeking information instead of the subterfuge by the schools by trying to block public information about admissions processes and graduate outcomes?

These schools basically are telling us, “Forget about rankings and pick a school that makes you *feel* good.” I’m sorry, but when people are spending hundreds of thousands of dollars for each child, that’s crap.

Frankly, the most honest information is probably coming from the Department of Education College Scorecard. It’s incomplete information since it’s only based on those who took out federal student loans, but it’s at least better than the fuzzy platitudes of the schools. It’s funny that, as far as I’ve seen, the schools that have so much zeal in criticizing the US News rankings rarely point to any other alternative like the College Scorecard (lest they find about the amount of student loans people are taking out for how a whole lot of schools and/or majors that have pretty terrible income prospects).

First of all you, mischaracterized what I wrote. I never said or implied you should pick a college based in “feelings.” I believe in facts and want as many good ones as I can get.

But overall college rankings aren’t facts and I’ve yet to see one that is. USNWR is opinion. By far its biggest factor is its “reputation” score, which is what other college administrators report knowing about a subject college. For 99% of colleges, most other college administrators know only where they’ve fallen in prior rankings. So they are self-fulfilling opinions.

Second, how in the world can you possibly assign an overall score to a college that isn’t necessarily values driven. Different applicants value different things. So it’s necessarily opinion and values based. Not science.

Again, if someone wants to build a sortable database of all the colleges, CDS reports and fact books etc, I’d love to use that. But assigning a single reductive score to a college is oversimplifying a complex process. It caters to our lazy instincts.

In a way, isn’t that what OP solved by posting a combined ranking list? Schools that do well consistently across a wide range of criteria used by these different rankings are probably really strong overall, right? Sure, putting all eggs in something like US News is a bad idea, but what about 8 independent rankings that look at different factors?

you’re ignoring my second point:
They are ALL subjective. From the factors they use (e.g., USNWR’s “reputation score”), but even the relative weighting of objective factors from all the rankings is itself subjective. How did they decide to weigh % of profs with terminal degrees? How about classes under 20? Why 20? Why not 22? or 25? Or 17?

How do they decide to weigh attrition and graduation rates?
How about athletics? for some kids, that is a big plus, for others, a big football school is a detriment.
Location? Someone may love an NYU campus, others may hate it. Some may love Dartmouth, some may find the remoteness stifling.
Test scores (especially in an environment where most are not submitting—that tells you very little about the actual student body).

Again, if someone wants to load all of this into a sortable database that we can manipulate and research, I’m all for it. But assigning a reductive ordinal ranking to an entire college is a folly. They just aren’t apples to apples comparisons.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:This page is exactly what’s wrong with rankings. Quibbling over Duke, Georgetown, Columbia is nonsense. There is no way anyone can credibly say any of these are “better” than the others. They are just different, with different areas of strength and different weakness. Many of the supposed strengths and weaknesses are just value judgments. There is no actual science behind college rankings and we should all just ignore them.

And, to the poster who keeps chiming in that it helped them cull down the 3000+ colleges, you could absolutely do that without any ordinal ranking.

Why is the blame on the consumers seeking information instead of the subterfuge by the schools by trying to block public information about admissions processes and graduate outcomes?

These schools basically are telling us, “Forget about rankings and pick a school that makes you *feel* good.” I’m sorry, but when people are spending hundreds of thousands of dollars for each child, that’s crap.

Frankly, the most honest information is probably coming from the Department of Education College Scorecard. It’s incomplete information since it’s only based on those who took out federal student loans, but it’s at least better than the fuzzy platitudes of the schools. It’s funny that, as far as I’ve seen, the schools that have so much zeal in criticizing the US News rankings rarely point to any other alternative like the College Scorecard (lest they find about the amount of student loans people are taking out for how a whole lot of schools and/or majors that have pretty terrible income prospects).

First of all you, mischaracterized what I wrote. I never said or implied you should pick a college based in “feelings.” I believe in facts and want as many good ones as I can get.

But overall college rankings aren’t facts and I’ve yet to see one that is. USNWR is opinion. By far its biggest factor is its “reputation” score, which is what other college administrators report knowing about a subject college. For 99% of colleges, most other college administrators know only where they’ve fallen in prior rankings. So they are self-fulfilling opinions.

Second, how in the world can you possibly assign an overall score to a college that isn’t necessarily values driven. Different applicants value different things. So it’s necessarily opinion and values based. Not science.

Again, if someone wants to build a sortable database of all the colleges, CDS reports and fact books etc, I’d love to use that. But assigning a single reductive score to a college is oversimplifying a complex process. It caters to our lazy instincts.

In a way, isn’t that what OP solved by posting a combined ranking list? Schools that do well consistently across a wide range of criteria used by these different rankings are probably really strong overall, right? Sure, putting all eggs in something like US News is a bad idea, but what about 8 independent rankings that look at different factors?

you’re ignoring my second point:
They are ALL subjective. From the factors they use (e.g., USNWR’s “reputation score”), but even the relative weighting of objective factors from all the rankings is itself subjective. How did they decide to weigh % of profs with terminal degrees? How about classes under 20? Why 20? Why not 22? or 25? Or 17?

How do they decide to weigh attrition and graduation rates?
How about athletics? for some kids, that is a big plus, for others, a big football school is a detriment.
Location? Someone may love an NYU campus, others may hate it. Some may love Dartmouth, some may find the remoteness stifling.
Test scores (especially in an environment where most are not submitting—that tells you very little about the actual student body).

Again, if someone wants to load all of this into a sortable database that we can manipulate and research, I’m all for it. But assigning a reductive ordinal ranking to an entire college is a folly. They just aren’t apples to apples comparisons.

No one is advocating for this combined ranking to be an end-all-be-all. It's just probably a better heuristic than only basing research off of US News or WSJ or Niche or whatever singular source you prefer

[Anonymous]

I'll wait for USnews

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I'll wait for USnews

The quality of a school doesn't change year-over-year... It seems like you look forward to it the same way people look forward to sports, but not for any practical use. At least combining 8 different rankings gives a more holistic view of how each school fares across a variety of criteria.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:This page is exactly what’s wrong with rankings. Quibbling over Duke, Georgetown, Columbia is nonsense. There is no way anyone can credibly say any of these are “better” than the others. They are just different, with different areas of strength and different weakness. Many of the supposed strengths and weaknesses are just value judgments. There is no actual science behind college rankings and we should all just ignore them.

And, to the poster who keeps chiming in that it helped them cull down the 3000+ colleges, you could absolutely do that without any ordinal ranking.

Why is the blame on the consumers seeking information instead of the subterfuge by the schools by trying to block public information about admissions processes and graduate outcomes?

These schools basically are telling us, “Forget about rankings and pick a school that makes you *feel* good.” I’m sorry, but when people are spending hundreds of thousands of dollars for each child, that’s crap.

Frankly, the most honest information is probably coming from the Department of Education College Scorecard. It’s incomplete information since it’s only based on those who took out federal student loans, but it’s at least better than the fuzzy platitudes of the schools. It’s funny that, as far as I’ve seen, the schools that have so much zeal in criticizing the US News rankings rarely point to any other alternative like the College Scorecard (lest they find about the amount of student loans people are taking out for how a whole lot of schools and/or majors that have pretty terrible income prospects).

First of all you, mischaracterized what I wrote. I never said or implied you should pick a college based in “feelings.” I believe in facts and want as many good ones as I can get.

But overall college rankings aren’t facts and I’ve yet to see one that is. USNWR is opinion. By far its biggest factor is its “reputation” score, which is what other college administrators report knowing about a subject college. For 99% of colleges, most other college administrators know only where they’ve fallen in prior rankings. So they are self-fulfilling opinions.

Second, how in the world can you possibly assign an overall score to a college that isn’t necessarily values driven. Different applicants value different things. So it’s necessarily opinion and values based. Not science.

Again, if someone wants to build a sortable database of all the colleges, CDS reports and fact books etc, I’d love to use that. But assigning a single reductive score to a college is oversimplifying a complex process. It caters to our lazy instincts.

In a way, isn’t that what OP solved by posting a combined ranking list? Schools that do well consistently across a wide range of criteria used by these different rankings are probably really strong overall, right? Sure, putting all eggs in something like US News is a bad idea, but what about 8 independent rankings that look at different factors?

you’re ignoring my second point:
They are ALL subjective. From the factors they use (e.g., USNWR’s “reputation score”), but even the relative weighting of objective factors from all the rankings is itself subjective. How did they decide to weigh % of profs with terminal degrees? How about classes under 20? Why 20? Why not 22? or 25? Or 17?

How do they decide to weigh attrition and graduation rates?
How about athletics? for some kids, that is a big plus, for others, a big football school is a detriment.
Location? Someone may love an NYU campus, others may hate it. Some may love Dartmouth, some may find the remoteness stifling.
Test scores (especially in an environment where most are not submitting—that tells you very little about the actual student body).

Again, if someone wants to load all of this into a sortable database that we can manipulate and research, I’m all for it. But assigning a reductive ordinal ranking to an entire college is a folly. They just aren’t apples to apples comparisons.

No one is advocating for this combined ranking to be an end-all-be-all. It's just probably a better heuristic than only basing research off of US News or WSJ or Niche or whatever singular source you prefer

Not necessarily. 10 crappy ranking systems have just as much potential to add more noise and error as one. Just create a class of "really good schools" and leave the pissing contests about position aside.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:
One to one combine doesn't make sense.

It should be weighed.

I say 40% weight for USN&WR, then the rest weighed appropriately.

If it is based on importance to consumers, USNWR should be at least 70%+ (and I'm not a USNWR fan by any stretch of the imagination)!

This is a helpful primer on a few of the rankings (USNWR, Forbes, and Niche):
https://blog.prepscholar.com/all-the-college-ranking-lists-you-should-read

WSJ still isn't a major player at this point. In my opinion, they've made a serious mistake keeping their college rankings and info behind their paywall. You have to access the rankings through their partner (Times Higher Education, which is far lesser known in the US). This impacts the branding and traffic significantly.

If you are going to weight USNWR at 70%, why have any combination at all? Silly. So is 40% for that reason.

So are any rankings standalone, but at least in those you have a chance to examine the individual methodology to determine if you find them useful.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:This page is exactly what’s wrong with rankings. Quibbling over Duke, Georgetown, Columbia is nonsense. There is no way anyone can credibly say any of these are “better” than the others. They are just different, with different areas of strength and different weakness. Many of the supposed strengths and weaknesses are just value judgments. There is no actual science behind college rankings and we should all just ignore them.

And, to the poster who keeps chiming in that it helped them cull down the 3000+ colleges, you could absolutely do that without any ordinal ranking.

Why is the blame on the consumers seeking information instead of the subterfuge by the schools by trying to block public information about admissions processes and graduate outcomes?

These schools basically are telling us, “Forget about rankings and pick a school that makes you *feel* good.” I’m sorry, but when people are spending hundreds of thousands of dollars for each child, that’s crap.

Frankly, the most honest information is probably coming from the Department of Education College Scorecard. It’s incomplete information since it’s only based on those who took out federal student loans, but it’s at least better than the fuzzy platitudes of the schools. It’s funny that, as far as I’ve seen, the schools that have so much zeal in criticizing the US News rankings rarely point to any other alternative like the College Scorecard (lest they find about the amount of student loans people are taking out for how a whole lot of schools and/or majors that have pretty terrible income prospects).

First of all you, mischaracterized what I wrote. I never said or implied you should pick a college based in “feelings.” I believe in facts and want as many good ones as I can get.

But overall college rankings aren’t facts and I’ve yet to see one that is. USNWR is opinion. By far its biggest factor is its “reputation” score, which is what other college administrators report knowing about a subject college. For 99% of colleges, most other college administrators know only where they’ve fallen in prior rankings. So they are self-fulfilling opinions.

Second, how in the world can you possibly assign an overall score to a college that isn’t necessarily values driven. Different applicants value different things. So it’s necessarily opinion and values based. Not science.

Again, if someone wants to build a sortable database of all the colleges, CDS reports and fact books etc, I’d love to use that. But assigning a single reductive score to a college is oversimplifying a complex process. It caters to our lazy instincts.

In a way, isn’t that what OP solved by posting a combined ranking list? Schools that do well consistently across a wide range of criteria used by these different rankings are probably really strong overall, right? Sure, putting all eggs in something like US News is a bad idea, but what about 8 independent rankings that look at different factors?

you’re ignoring my second point:
They are ALL subjective. From the factors they use (e.g., USNWR’s “reputation score”), but even the relative weighting of objective factors from all the rankings is itself subjective. How did they decide to weigh % of profs with terminal degrees? How about classes under 20? Why 20? Why not 22? or 25? Or 17?

How do they decide to weigh attrition and graduation rates?
How about athletics? for some kids, that is a big plus, for others, a big football school is a detriment.
Location? Someone may love an NYU campus, others may hate it. Some may love Dartmouth, some may find the remoteness stifling.
Test scores (especially in an environment where most are not submitting—that tells you very little about the actual student body).

Again, if someone wants to load all of this into a sortable database that we can manipulate and research, I’m all for it. But assigning a reductive ordinal ranking to an entire college is a folly. They just aren’t apples to apples comparisons.

+1 We actually did buy a sortable spreadsheet that I found super useful in figuring out ideas for the kids to look at. It doesn't include USNew's dubious "reputation" score but all the other stats that get made publicly available.

https://www.diycollegerankings.com/diy-college-rankings-spreadsheet-lp-2/?utm_source=PRODUCTS&utm_medium=Best%20College&utm_campaign=College%20Spreadsheet

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:No, the schools dislike all of the rankings. The others just don't get enough eyeballs for them to actually complain about!
Unfortunately for those outlets, they are hardly part of the conversation.

At the very least, Wall Street Journal, Forbes, and Niche definitely get lots of eyeballs. Anytime you google rankings Niche is always one of the first to pop up.

sorry but no. Niche and the other new alleeged pay-to-play college admissions counselors will tell you to look at USNWR. If you don't know the history behind it from 1983 on read wiki on it. After the rest of the UNWR magazine failed, it discovered that the college rankings made ad money! who knew? Then everyone else, including their neighbors, piled on with unregulated "college counseling services."

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Ranking college makes no sense at all. What is the point?

Coming from a different country, rankings have been useful in understanding the college landscape. Of course they're not meant to be the only consideration, but they help give a general sense of where things stand. I never would have known, for example, that Rice is a very good university.

+1 in my country we only knew a few American schools like MIT, Harvard, Caltech, Duke, Stanford, and a few others. There are many more great universities that we didn’t know about until coming here.

So are all the rankings obsessed posters on here immigrants? They rely on the rankings to learn about schools they don’t hear about in movies or overseas? I never understood the obsession with USNWR, but this makes more sense.

You are a very rude and racist person.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:This page is exactly what’s wrong with rankings. Quibbling over Duke, Georgetown, Columbia is nonsense. There is no way anyone can credibly say any of these are “better” than the others. They are just different, with different areas of strength and different weakness. Many of the supposed strengths and weaknesses are just value judgments. There is no actual science behind college rankings and we should all just ignore them.

And, to the poster who keeps chiming in that it helped them cull down the 3000+ colleges, you could absolutely do that without any ordinal ranking.

Why is the blame on the consumers seeking information instead of the subterfuge by the schools by trying to block public information about admissions processes and graduate outcomes?

These schools basically are telling us, “Forget about rankings and pick a school that makes you *feel* good.” I’m sorry, but when people are spending hundreds of thousands of dollars for each child, that’s crap.

Frankly, the most honest information is probably coming from the Department of Education College Scorecard. It’s incomplete information since it’s only based on those who took out federal student loans, but it’s at least better than the fuzzy platitudes of the schools. It’s funny that, as far as I’ve seen, the schools that have so much zeal in criticizing the US News rankings rarely point to any other alternative like the College Scorecard (lest they find about the amount of student loans people are taking out for how a whole lot of schools and/or majors that have pretty terrible income prospects).

First of all you, mischaracterized what I wrote. I never said or implied you should pick a college based in “feelings.” I believe in facts and want as many good ones as I can get.

But overall college rankings aren’t facts and I’ve yet to see one that is. USNWR is opinion. By far its biggest factor is its “reputation” score, which is what other college administrators report knowing about a subject college. For 99% of colleges, most other college administrators know only where they’ve fallen in prior rankings. So they are self-fulfilling opinions.

Second, how in the world can you possibly assign an overall score to a college that isn’t necessarily values driven. Different applicants value different things. So it’s necessarily opinion and values based. Not science.

Again, if someone wants to build a sortable database of all the colleges, CDS reports and fact books etc, I’d love to use that. But assigning a single reductive score to a college is oversimplifying a complex process. It caters to our lazy instincts.

In a way, isn’t that what OP solved by posting a combined ranking list? Schools that do well consistently across a wide range of criteria used by these different rankings are probably really strong overall, right? Sure, putting all eggs in something like US News is a bad idea, but what about 8 independent rankings that look at different factors?

you’re ignoring my second point:
They are ALL subjective. From the factors they use (e.g., USNWR’s “reputation score”), but even the relative weighting of objective factors from all the rankings is itself subjective. How did they decide to weigh % of profs with terminal degrees? How about classes under 20? Why 20? Why not 22? or 25? Or 17?

How do they decide to weigh attrition and graduation rates?
How about athletics? for some kids, that is a big plus, for others, a big football school is a detriment.
Location? Someone may love an NYU campus, others may hate it. Some may love Dartmouth, some may find the remoteness stifling.
Test scores (especially in an environment where most are not submitting—that tells you very little about the actual student body).

Again, if someone wants to load all of this into a sortable database that we can manipulate and research, I’m all for it. But assigning a reductive ordinal ranking to an entire college is a folly. They just aren’t apples to apples comparisons.

No one is advocating for this combined ranking to be an end-all-be-all. It's just probably a better heuristic than only basing research off of US News or WSJ or Niche or whatever singular source you prefer

Not necessarily. 10 crappy ranking systems have just as much potential to add more noise and error as one. Just create a class of "really good schools" and leave the pissing contests about position aside.

+1

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Ranking college makes no sense at all. What is the point?

Coming from a different country, rankings have been useful in understanding the college landscape. Of course they're not meant to be the only consideration, but they help give a general sense of where things stand. I never would have known, for example, that Rice is a very good university.

+1 in my country we only knew a few American schools like MIT, Harvard, Caltech, Duke, Stanford, and a few others. There are many more great universities that we didn’t know about until coming here.

So are all the rankings obsessed posters on here immigrants? They rely on the rankings to learn about schools they don’t hear about in movies or overseas? I never understood the obsession with USNWR, but this makes more sense.

No it's rich White ALDC folks. Some of them pay multi-million dollars to get in high ranked elite schools.
Look how far they go in order to get into high ranked schools.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Varsity_Blues_scandal

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Ranking college makes no sense at all. What is the point?

Coming from a different country, rankings have been useful in understanding the college landscape. Of course they're not meant to be the only consideration, but they help give a general sense of where things stand. I never would have known, for example, that Rice is a very good university.

+1 in my country we only knew a few American schools like MIT, Harvard, Caltech, Duke, Stanford, and a few others. There are many more great universities that we didn’t know about until coming here.

So are all the rankings obsessed posters on here immigrants? They rely on the rankings to learn about schools they don’t hear about in movies or overseas? I never understood the obsession with USNWR, but this makes more sense.

No it's rich White ALDC folks. Some of them pay multi-million dollars to get in high ranked elite schools.
Look how far they go in order to get into high ranked schools.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Varsity_Blues_scandal

+1 follow the money